Thursday, June 5, 2008

Dan inks my Turtles Part 2

When I went in to Mirage Studios today, these were waiting for me:

As you can see, Dan Berger worked his special brand of inking magic on my three Turtle drawings. I'm going to scan these tonight and hopefully get them off to Steve Lavigne tomorrow so he can start laying colors down on them.

And while I was at the office today, I decided to go ahead and -- inspired by some of the comments on my blog -- do the following drawing, which Dan has also agreed to ink:

It's funny, I was rather drawn to Splinter in the beginning, but not strongly-- then I sort of was a Raph fan, though Leo soon grew on me-- then came the "drought" until 2k3, when I rediscovered them, and Leo was the ONE-- but as I watched the show (sorry; it drew me back, not comics) I developed a growing love of this poor rat who suddenly found himself an adoptive parent...

You know, Pete, I hope this doesn't come off as insulting...because it's not meant to be :).

But I found the original toon in 1989. The comics which I didn't know about (no internet ;)) in 1993..and I picked up a City at War issue first. It took me a LONG while to get used to the style of how Splinter was drawn. It wasn't much different, but something about it just seemed weird. This is my favorite Splinter drawing to date. A nice mesh of the two ;).

Dunno if anyone else feels the same way, or if they think I'm crazy in thinking they look so drastically different, but ah well ;).

HOT DAMN. Those drawings are simply excellent. And not to take anything away from PL, but I gotta say, Dan is one of the best inkers around (and i'm not even basing that on any TMNT bias). His line economy is incredible, and flow is just...wow. These rank among the best TMNT drawings I've seen in ages. Great job, both of you!

"Neil V said...You know, Pete, I hope this doesn't come off as insulting...because it's not meant to be :).

But I found the original toon in 1989. The comics which I didn't know about (no internet ;)) in 1993..and I picked up a City at War issue first. It took me a LONG while to get used to the style of how Splinter was drawn. It wasn't much different, but something about it just seemed weird. This is my favorite Splinter drawing to date. A nice mesh of the two ;).

Dunno if anyone else feels the same way, or if they think I'm crazy in thinking they look so drastically different, but ah well ;)."

Neil, that's not at all insulting. I think the big difference between the original MIrage version of Splinter and the way he was rendered in the first cartoon series is that we (Kevin and I) didn't REALLY try to make him look too much like a rat. I can't remember if we really tried to, or if we were just "winging it" and trying to draw what we THOUGHT looked like a rat, from memory.

The folks at Playmates and MWS took the rat thing literally, as they probably should have, and drew Splinter so that he really did look more like a rat (a mutated one, of course, but a rat nonetheless).

I've always preferred the way we drew him, because I think he has something both noble and potentially feral in his look. Also, he looks a little bit more like a dog the way we drew him, and -- truth be told -- I prefer dogs to rats. -- PL

Wow, truly impressive!I can't wait to see these colored!It's amazing to see the process: from pencil, to ink, to color. You truly do have an amazing way of drawing the turtles, that only gets better with time!

Hah! Yes, I think I touched on it in at least two different issues of the comics -- Volume 1, #12, when the crazed survivalist Skonk meets up with Splinter in the woods, and issue #6 of Volume 4 when Shadow's boyfriend Jake sees Splinter through his rifle's telescopic sight. Both were "in-jokes" that I included after hearing a number of times from readers and fans that Splinter looked more like a dog than a rat. -- PL